Builder Profile: Dagmar Custom Guitars

TOP: The Dagmar Custom Guitars Vicky model. BOTTOM LEFT: The crown from the Vicky tailpiece is a nod to Queen’s University’s role in developing photonic pickup technology on the guitar. BOTTOM MIDDLE:
Vicky’s headstock. BOTTOM RIGHT: Custom lightning bolt inlays on the Vicky model. Photos courtesy of Queen’s University

Mark Trokanski had just decided he
was done acquiring guitars when he
came across a photo from the Montreal
Guitar show that stopped him dead in his
tracks. He saw four archtops with completely
rounded edges and lightning-bolt
soundholes, two of which featured a checkerboard
pattern around the curved rims.
These instruments sat atop a table labeled
“Pete Swanson.”

These guitars were so visually striking that
Trokanski ceased reading entirely and simply
stared at the instruments, which were unlike
anything he’d seen, yet somehow seemed
familiar. A 25-year guitar collector and medical
researcher, Trokanski already had at least
20 guitars, but he’d never had one made specifically
for him from scratch, and the idea
of commissioning a piece of playable artwork
was too intriguing to ignore.

As days went by and he was unable to put
the novice luthier out of his mind, he drafted
a letter of introduction and began inquiring
about the work. And so commenced a
months-long courtship (as they both now
describe it) between the builder and collector.

“We were sussing each other out,” says
Trokanski, “because the relationship between
the luthier and the player is an interesting
one. This is someone who you’re going to
trust to turn your vision into reality.”

For some reason, Trokanski had absolute
faith and trust in the newcomer from the
get-go, and after a few communications,
things took an abrupt turn. “It was very
surreal,” Swanson admits. “All of a sudden
Mark said, ‘Okay, I want to move forward,
so what do we do next?’”

Perhaps Trokanski was taking a risk.
After all, at this point the Canadian builder
had made only six guitars and was a novice
in the guitar world. But he had a knack for
using mathematical calculations to determine
how to manipulate wood—a skill
he’d developed in the early 2000s building
interiors for yachts. It seems Swanson’s
background was the perfect storm: Before
taking on woodworking, he was a graphic
artist, and what he learned about drafting
sketches or 3-D rendering, he now applies
to his guitar designs.

Yet to understand the genesis of Dagmar
Custom Guitars, says Swanson, you have
to go back to the weeks leading up to his
daughter’s 16th birthday. A friend of his had
been cleaning out his garage and was looking
to unload a ’60s Canadian bicycle. Swanson
saw an opportunity to salvage it and create a
one-of-a-kind birthday gift, and with visions
of hot rods dancing in his head, he brought
the bike home and started tinkering.

“I made a wooden tank and a checkerboard
dial for the frame,” he says, “and then
when I started to adorn the bike, I thought
it would be really cool to do matching
fenders.” But he had never made bike fenders
before, and wasn’t quite sure how he was
going to do it. Almost the very next day at
work, Swanson observed a coworker experimenting
with an urn to hold the cremains
of their boss’ recently deceased father.

“He was taking thin strips of wood cut
to specific angles on each side,” Swanson
explains, “and at the end of the day he
had this octagon-shaped vessel. He then
rounded the corners with a belt sander and
it became this smooth vase. That night I
woke up with a eureka moment thinking
about how I could build the fenders by
using his technique.”

Lo and behold, it worked, but Swanson
didn’t stop there. Always an innovator, he
decided to further experiment, creating a
ducktail fender using the same process. “As
soon as I realized I could reverse the curve,”
he says, “I immediately thought of a guitar.”

A Guitar Is Born
Swanson started to mentally map out what
would be his prototype guitar. Around the
same time, he enrolled in a business class at
a local college with intentions of debuting
his own brand of custom one-off guitars.
He registered his new company’s name,
Dagmar Custom Guitars, in August 2008.

Swanson named his enterprise after
Dagmar, a 1950s starlet whose real name
was Jennie Ruthy Lewis. Dagmar was
curvy—much like Swanson’s designs—and
although she usually played stereotypical
“dumb blonde” roles, she was revered for
her intelligence and wit. Swanson’s affinity
for hot rods and all things beautiful
made “Dagmar” an obvious choice. In the
1950s, the term emerged as a slang word
for bullet-shaped Cadillac bumpers, a nod
to the rocket bra made popular by Lewis
on various American television shows.
(In 1951, Dagmar was featured in her
trademark costume on the cover of Life
magazine, and during the Korean war a
self-propelled anti-aircraft tank was dubbed
Dagmar’s Twin 40s in her honor.)

Swanson calls his first guitar (named
Ruthy) “fairly simple,” despite the revolutionary
process he used to build it. Like
all of his designs, the outside is completely
round, and the inside parabolic and smooth.
The sides are put together with more than
80 pie-shaped segments—think keystones
in Roman arches. When the “keystones” are
bonded together they form the guitar shape.

“When you add compound curves to
a structure,” says Swanson, “the result is a
tremendous increase in strength. My guitars
do not depend on the top and back
plates to counteract the 150 pounds of tension
created by the strings.” Essentially, the
top and back of the instrument suffer less
stress and are freer to vibrate.

Swanson shapes the guitar’s curvaceous
body by hand using digital calipers to
ensure the thickness stays consistent. To
increase sustain, he graduates the thickness
in spots, leaving more mass near the neck
and fading thinner and thinner near the
waist. The inside is laminated with carbon
fiber, making the entire structure rigid, yet
lightweight. The result is a focused, punchy
sound that Swanson and Trokanski compare
to an amphitheater effect.

So far, all of Swanson’s necks have been
bolt-on, and he says they weather better
than others due to increased stability from
nine laminations and a carbon-fiber fitting
that acts as a small sleeve. It’s epoxy-bonded
into the body and fits the neck heel and
tenon. A single bolt goes through the
neck block and is tightened with an Allen
key. Then a thick heel cap is doweled and
epoxy-bonded to the body to extend the
neck joint. There’s also a small bolt that
goes through the heel cap and into the
neck heel, which serves as an anchor.

Stay Connected

Sign up for our email newsletters!

Get the PG Apps

On PremierGuitar.com, "Sponsored Content" refers to articles, videos, or audio recordings that are produced or curated by an advertiser but that Premier Guitar is happy to share alongside our own editorial content due to the Sponsored Content’s educational, musical, or entertainment value. Sponsored Content is clearly labeled everywhere it appears, and Premier Guitar's editorial department has no involvement in its creation.